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Cosmic Game: start with a creative destruction of your understanding of yourself

My previous blog post on the Cosmic Game got some quick twitter comments. Thanks @rzeligzon and @siguy for not letting me be lazy.

Fair warning:
if you are content with the Newtonian physics and the hierarchical view of the world with a Creator on top - stop reading now. Just like discovery of the theory of relativity, some of this knowledge will have a ripple effect that will force you to re-examine your values. For the rest I'd like to start with a little creative destruction of your own sense of "I".

The "I" as you know it is at best incomplete. Number one exercise that I tried was an observation of my mind. I have not yet successfully been able to control my thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. As you become an observer of where your thoughts go you quickly realize that your mind is actually not you. This is contrary to the western notion of "I think" and "I reason." The control of one's mind is generally worse then their control of their pinky. Because of that you can safely say that your mind is as much you or as much not you as other organs in your body.

The second exercise is an attempt to describe yourself without describing your environment. Try to convey what it is that you are by just sticking to your physical body parts. For a complete description: very quickly you will start involving your environment. In order to describe what you are you will need to pull in information about what you do, where, with what.

These two very basic exercises challenge the normal notion of an "I". An "I" is neither your thoughts, nor is it your physical body. The things that surround you, other beings outside and inside of you are also a part of the "I". There is a way to understand the more complete "I" and evolve the "I" beyond the basic machinery that has reflexes to internal and external forces.

Part of the danger of disclosing this knowledge is that you start getting the power of interacting with other "I"s in non-obvious ways. Some of that is touched on by Bandler and Grinder in their work on the Neuro Linguistic Programming. A simple example of mis-use of this kind of knowledge is the following: someone who learned how to interact with you in non-physical ways, and influence your mind which you don't control can take advantage of you and still be completely within conventional legal boundaries.

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